Ambient Occlusion for Animated Characters

Abstract

We present a novel technique for approximating ambient occlusion of animated objects. Our method automatically
determines the correspondence between animation parameters and per-vertex ambient occlusion using a set of
reference poses as its input. Then, at runtime, the ambient occlusion is approximated by taking a dot product
between the current animation parameters and static per-vertex coefficients. According to our results, both the
computational and storage requirements are low enough for the technique to be directly applicable to computer
games running on current graphics hardware. The resulting images are also significantly more realistic than the
commonly used static ambient occlusion solutions.